Epic CEO: AAA Browser Games Already Being Explored

Fancy running your console games in your browser? Well that's where we're headed, according to Tim Sweeney. The Epic CEO believes that in a few years' time we'll see console and mobile games available for play as native HTML5 and JavaScript applications within web browsers.

"We're slowly heading in that direction as an industry," said Sweeney, talking to Gamasutra. "You should be able to take any game -- a PlayStation 3 or iOS game, for example -- and just go to that and play it from any web browser."

The possibilities are already being explored, with C++ software such as Epic's own Unreal Engine 3 able to translate across onto platforms running Flash.

"You give it any C++ program, like Unreal Engine 3, and it translates it to a platform-independent application that can run within Flash, within any web browser or on any platform where Flash runs," said Sweeney. "That's an awesome breakthrough; it shows you the possibilities."

"I think the next step in that is cross-compiling games from C++ or whatever and directly running them as native HTML5 and JavaScript applications within any standard web browser."

But it's not going to happen overnight. The current slew of web browsers, and the still-unpredictable nature of Flash means that crashes would occur frequently.

"In another few years, I think that's going to be a very realistic scenario," concluded Sweeney. "And so the web will generally be a platform, and you can have a real application with a full feature set that runs within a web browser; that'll be very welcome.

"The web is a fairly awkward experience when you use a platform that's not the majority of the install base, and I think we're going to see big improvements there in the next few years."